Sue’s Views: Fighting fake news

We had an incident at the office the other day where an irate person stormed into the building spouting forth about ‘fake news’ and our newspaper. After trying to calm them down, unsuccessfully I might add, much finger pointing (them) and gnashing of teeth (us) they stormed out none the wiser still insisting the offending article was ‘fake news’.

Which brings me to that catchphrase ‘fake news’ that all and sundry seem to be bandying about these days after American president Donald Trump popularised it. The term when watered down to basics is the dissemination of deliberate disinformation by compiling articles with little to no legitimate news but use eye-catching headlines to increase sales or generate public interest.

ALSO READ: Older people, conservatives more likely to share fake news: study

Think along the lines of those headlines online that are crafted to pique your interest, some I might add very cleverly done, which when you open the article and discover it is clickbait. I go straight to the comments section on these type of articles where some poor twit with time on his hands has read through the entire thing and posts a summary which normally ends with “Not worth the read….it’s clickbait” or neatly adds a spoiler alert of the content.

With the advent of social media, everybody is now a pseudo-journalist. Post and it’s out there for eternity in cyberspace and so is your integrity. Smartphones get whipped out, pics snapped, videos taken and uploaded online within minutes with little thought or research was undertaken to substantiate the image or the accompanying story.

Oh, if only we in the industry had the luxury of doing the same. From a story breaking to actually appearing in print or online, there are numerous background and factual checks, proofing, editing and when circumstances call for it, obtaining comment from the person/s involved.

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